steampowered sunday Archives - Page 3 of 6

Grand Anniversary

April 27, 2014 by Belghast

No Free Lunch

Last night was Saturday night, and that means we recorded another episode of the Tales of the Aggronaut podcast… AggroChat! We had a few odd things going on last night. Firstly Rae was off travelling in world visiting her longtime friends Ahi and Bez. This means she was completely unavailable. Additionally Kodra was travelling, and connected in from crappy hotel wifi in San Francisco… leading him to be a little bit robotty. However we pushed through all of this and picked up a 4th player in the form of our good friend Tam. He had been talked about plenty of times on the podcast already, and it only seemed fitting to have him sub in. Super thankful for him to be willing to do it in a pinch. We talked about all manner of things including Hex Closed Beta, ArcheAge and the concept of selling entry into the beta process, and our ideal scenarios as far as character building and abilities in MMOs go.

We are going to have to find a way to stay more on topic, because each episode has increased every so slightly in length. The first one was right at an hour, the second an hour and fifteen minutes, and this one roughly an hour and thirty minutes. We could have formal topics that we push through, but I personally like the meandering format, because it means it is more like the natural conversations we already have. I wish I had kept rolling because moments after I cut the podcast off we had a pretty epic conversation about how Lucasfilm is disavowing the entire Expanded Universe concept… and while we will miss some things maybe it isn’t so much of a bad idea. There were some really odd fan service things about the Expanded Universe that don’t really hold up story wise.

Steampowered Sunday #11

When Elder Scrolls Online released on a Sunday, it pretty much put a severe halt to my blog series known as Steampowered Sunday where I take some time and play a game from my backlog of titles. Last night during the podcast we were talking about a game that Ashgar had been playing this week that fell firmly into the Bullet Hell genre. Kodra seemed to think this was madness, and having been a big fan of Ikaruga I totally understood the draw. There was a time period when I used to play lots of bullet hell shooters and pre-hell shooters. Gradius, Darius Twin, Raiden Trad… all games I remember fondly. I was never particularly good at them, but I enjoyed them nonetheless. I remember playing 1942 on the nintendo for hour upon hour trying to make my way through all the stages.

At some point I just stopped playing them. I think it was during the death of the dreamcast, but when I bought my PS2 I just simply stopped picking up the games anymore. While I have Gradius 5 on my PS2, I guess my tastes in games changed a bit. This honestly more than anything represents a period of time when I stopped playing consoles very much and started consuming games almost exclusively on the PC. Every now and then I would flirt with a new shooter like the ever amazing Jamestown, but I never really got heavily into it again. Last night in an attempt to cold boot this series again, Ashgar griefed me by gifting me a copy of a really rather awesome bullet hell shooter on steam. At face value Danmaku Unlimited 2 reminds me of a less technical cousin to Ikaruga. The soundtrack is in part what makes the gameplay, and helps you do what is needed to make it through the levels. The secret to a bullet hell is to zone out and focus only on the pattern and not so much about the rest of the noise on screen. Only a few things can actually hurt you, so you focus in on those things.

The hilarity of my play through is that after years of not playing these games my reflexes that had built up are completely gone. In addition I am playing this game roughly thirty minutes after waking up. So yeah I do pretty bad. Ashgar tried to make me feel better by saying that I did significantly better than he did the first time. Essentially the gameplay video is roughly seventeen minutes and the point at which I ran out of lives to keep going. I made it to about the mid point of stage four. All in all I think I did a pretty good job. The awesome thing about the game is it is really cheap. So for the price you cannot beat this kind of bullet hell goodness. I feel like there is a lot of customization in the way you set up the game. I went with pretty generic options and was playing on easy, so I think there is a lot more depth to be had there if I dig into it. Probably going to stream some more of me trying to play it later. In any case… I have successfully rebooted the Steampowered Sunday feature. Long live me playing through my steam backlog!

Grand Anniversary

Last but definitely not least… today is the one year anniversary of the Grand Experiment… my attempt to blog something each and every day. This means as of today I have made a post every single day for a year. That is a pretty significant feat and I am really damned proud of myself for sticking with it. At this point I figure I am going to try and make it another whole year without letting the beat drop. It hasn’t been the most easy thing to do, but I want to take a moment to thank my wife who has been extremely supportive in this adventure. There have been days where I might not have made it through the post without her just assuming that it was going to happen and giving me time and space to do so. Additionally I want to thank my friends who have supported me in this madness and my readers. There have been moments when I felt alone in my mission, and was surprised at how many of you have reached out your arms to help me along the way. Somehow I have gone from being the least regular of bloggers… to the most regular, and it is a pretty insane transition. I feel like I have grown a lot in the past year, and I thank you all for helping me with it.

Assassin’s Creed II

March 23, 2014 by Belghast

Steampowered Sunday #10

I have had a really lousy week, and if you have followed my blog you know why. However that said, I did not want to break the Steampowered Sunday tradition. This week we had a tie between Assassin’s Creed II and Evoland, and in order to settle the tie I essentially flipped a coin. As a result I played roughly and hour and a half of Assassin’s Creed II. At face value this seems like a game I would not like very much, considering in general I do not like stealth titles. However so many friends of mine have been so into this game series that I felt like I had to give it a try. I feel like I am somehow losing gamer cred by admitting that I have never played ANY of the Assassin’s Creed games before today.

Watch live video from Belghast on TwitchTVAll of my friends have said that the essential title that I needed to start with was Assassin’s Creed II, so as a result that is the title I have placed in the running for a few weeks. Initially the title suffers from many of the console game tropes that I hate. Namely the “long introduction” and the forced “stealth” to get to an area where the game opens up. Then when you finally get into the action, there is yet another trope that I cannot stand… “the un-skippable mini-game” namely in the form of the rooftop race with your brother. So early on… things were not looking really good for this title. Within the first 15 minutes it had committed three cardinal sins. That said I kept playing and eventually got a grasp on why exactly this game is fun.

Where this game shines is the open world exploration aspect. While they only give you a small area at a time to roam around, for the most part you are allowed to get to your objective in whatever fashion you like. Additionally the “stealth” aspect of the game is extremely forgiving. If you are “feeling your wheaties” you can beat the shit out of your pursuers, or if you don’t feel like fighting you can simply run away and in a grand theft auto style wait for the coast to be clear again. Your enemies show up as very clear red dots on the map, and in many times you can simply blend into the crowd to avoid them. The only time they seem to notice you is if you are extremely close or doing something like running about or doing something to draw attention to yourself.

I realize at an hour and a half into the game I have barely scratched the surface. So far it seems like the game progresses in a very GTA style, where you are presented a series of small quests. Some of them involve going and fetching something, others beating up a person, and others still following around NPCs and helping them with some task. All of this is pretty boring, but the fact that you can accomplish these missions by wandering around the rooftops of the city make it far more enjoyable. I can see why people are into this title, and I think I would like it even more if it were more open and free. I can only imagine how great this title would be if it were presented in a more “fallout” type sandbox manner. Right now you are given pretty clear direction in what the quests do and which ones you should take.

So far the only real frustration is when I manage to get a “timed event” style quest. I find movement in this world to be cludgy at best, especially after being used to the parkour of newer games like Titanfall. There are many times where I do something like leap off of a building that I did not intend, but did so because I either didn’t wait long enough for my camera angle to readjust or waited too long. If I can get used to the quirks of the movement I feel like my enjoyment will improve, however when you put me under a timer and the movement does something screwball I feel like throwing the controller across the room. I have to remind myself that this game was initially released in 2009, and since then game controls have become so much more responsive. I am sure if I cracked open Assassin’s Creed IV many of these issues have been solved.

Overall I think this is going to be a title I play quite a bit more of. In fact once I finish a few chores this morning, I will probably boot it back up and play some more. I am hooked enough on what is there to make me want to play some more. Right now I am also feeling deeply antisocial, so a single player title is a good option. At this moment I am tentatively positive about the game and considering I got it as part of a massive package of other Assassin’s Creed titles, I can see maybe going back and playing the others as well. My friends all told me to start with 2, because there were some serious controllability issues prior to that point. If that is the case I am very glad I did, because I already feel like 2 is more than a little awkward, I would not have likely made it this far in a title where the controls were worse.

FTL: Faster Than Light

March 16, 2014 by Belghast

Steampowered Sunday #9

Watch live video from Belghast on TwitchTV

This week I am doing something a little differently with my Steampowered Sunday post. Since streaming is new and shiny… and as a result I am doing a ton of it… I decided to livestream my playtime in FTL. This was after all the game you chose for me to play this week. Previously I had done a few things wrong with my voting. Firstly I made the link super hard to see at the bottom of my post. Secondly I gave you guys like ten choices to choose from, which ended up with a bunch of widely dispersed results. This go around I opted to have you all choose from the three that did not win last week, but had the highest number of votes. You all apparently wanted me to play FTL, because it managed to net 53% of the vote.

Steep Learning Curve

Like most of the games I play for Steampowered Sunday, I went into FTL with absolutely no information. This is one of those titles that was insanely popular in the internet zeitgeist a few months back. I picked it up on a steam sale but never actually got around to playing it. As a result it sat there sadly in my steam library until you guys resurrected it. This is one of those games that is really hard to go into cold. I liken it to trying to play Minecraft for the first time without any guides. So I had no clue how to do anything in the game, and ended up dying horribly to the first encounter I happened across. I thought my weapons would fire themselves I guess. It was not honestly until my third ship that I managed to glean that you could toggle on and off your weapons with the number keys, and fire them that way as well.

Similarly it took me a bit to understand that moving your crew around the ship would help to put out fires, fight boarding parties and repair damaged systems. Essentially playing FTL you die a lot, and hopefully you learned something from the death that you can carry forward into the next ship. That said sometimes you just get fucked by random chance. In the above screenshot I happened to wander into a star system with active solar flares. Just like in Star Trek episodes… solar flares are murder on your shields. Had I happened across the system with no hostiles I could have potentially pooled my resources in the shield room and kept myself repaired long enough to jump out. That said I had a pretty nasty fight with a mantis drone and by the time that was finished my system was a mess. I fought the death of my ship in vain as the solar flares slowly destroyed me.

Belghast Gameplay Not Suggested

I really do one thing in video games… I run in guns-a-blazing and hope for the best. In an FPS I am the king of the spray and pray arsenal. In an MMO I am the guy that habitually charges everything. It is the thing I do. This is very much not the way you want to play FTL, unless you like resetting constantly. If you wander into a system and encounter an “advanced tactical drone” chances are you should really not screw with that. I had that happen, and it started neutral to me… but moments after attacking it, it had disabled all of my ships systems and I was left to sit and watch as all things blew up around me. I feel like that is the real lesson of FTL… stuff happens, often times bad… so hope you can learn from it and not be dumb in the next iteration. The game is pretty brutal about punishing you for your bad decisions, and that is okay… because it tends to be brutal about everything.

I feel like there are so many things I am still missing about success. While playing one of my friends told me over twitch chat that I could vent the compartment to space to put out fires. Which is awesome… except I couldn’t seem to do that when I had attackers in a compartment. The learning curve is exceedingly steep and unforgiving. Much like that first time I played Minecraft, I feel like I need to spend an entire afternoon wandering around a wiki somewhere to figure out what exactly I was doing wrong. I feel like there is a “oh! That is what Coal looks like” moment waiting to happen.

Deathcab for Cutie and Starships

One of the things I enjoyed the most about the game is the soundtrack. It is this really pleasant postal service/deathcab type soundtrack that makes you not care so much that the world is burning down around you. This is one of those moments when I happened to get trapped behind enemy lines and had to fight a far more advanced ship than I had. Notice how they pretty much disabled everything I had and are essentially unharmed. I feel like this is where tactics come in, which is never a strong suit of mine. I tend to be a “shoot first, ask questions never” type player… and this is going to be something I have to get over if I ever want to succeed at FTL for more than a few minutes. Tactics matter a lot, and one of the things I learned early on is… if they have drones, for the love of god kill the drones.

Right now I am really bad at deciding what thing to attack first. I tend to have the best luck destroying ships by killing their engines. That said I feel like i would have a lot more success disabling their weapons, then shields, then engines. When they are charging the engines to escape it seems like a single shot to the engine can slow them down enough to kill them before they jump. So I know this is a good theory, but getting me to do that when everything is burning on my ship seems to be the problem. To quote Wash… “Oh god, Oh God, We’re Gonna Die”. I have trouble keeping focused when my cute little people are dying horribly fighting fires. In the immortal words of my friend Vexa… “Fire is pretty much the worst.”

More Play Warranted

I feel like I am fundamentally bad at this game. That said I feel like this is an okay thing. Much like MInecraft, one of the simple joys is rolling the dice and seeing what combination of events you happen to get this time. I felt completely fine resetting and starting over from scratch. In many ways this reminds me of an early Shareware title called EGA Trek that I used to play the hell out of. The gameplay basically was the same, it involved warping around the galaxy looking for trouble. I played this game for hours upon hours… rolling the dice and seeing what trouble I could get myself into. Combat was very similar, and I would not be shocked at all if the FTL folks had played this game at one point or another. Granted FTL is all of this in much higher detail, but the same pure fun is there. Sometimes it is just fun to die over and over horribly. May the “SS Were Gonna Die” continue to fly onwards.

Mystery Game Time

I’ve decided to shift things up a bit, and start giving away random games instead of a specific title per week. This weeks winner will be contacted today and given a copy of Brutal Legend. However this coming week I will be grabbing something from the stack of mostly indie games that I have laying around. If you win, and it is a title you already have… share the love and give it to a friend that doesn’t already have the game. Another thing I am doing is leaving the two losing titles on the list, and replacing FTL with a brand new title… this week Evoland enters the ring. This way I actually have a shot of playing through the games that were the losers of previous weeks. As always to take the survey click the big bright button below.

Brutal Legend

March 9, 2014 by Belghast

Steampowered Sunday #8

This week I decided to mix things up a bit. Instead of me picking the title I let my readers pick. I learned a few things about this, firstly google docs apparently is not a great option since one of my more “inquisitive” friends decided to see if he could skew the results by voting multiple times. Sure enough you could, but it was pretty easy to see his results and weed them out. Additionally it seems like giving you guys ten titles to pick from was a bit too many. For most of the week there was a four way tie, with two results each for Brutal Legend, FTL, Assassins Creed II, and Alan Wake. On Saturday there was a deciding vote cast for Brutal Legend so that is precisely what I played this morning. I am thinking this week we will have a runoff between the other three titles.

Let’s Rock!

First off a little background about this title. I grew up at exactly the right time, during the height of the hair metal era. While I did not actually have cable television until college, I jealously watched Headbangers Ball anytime I was over at a friends house. I had my faded jean jacket with a Metallica back patch, walkman in the inside pocket and headphones permanently cranked full volume. That’s right… I was a Metal kid… and while Metal turned into Alternative turned into Industrial… I still have a penchant for it. So much like Blood Dragon was going to be a nostalgic ride, I knew this game would as well. Thing is… I didn’t buy this title on purpose. I ended up getting it as part of a humble indie bundle.

From the moment I saw this game I was intrigued, but one thing scared me away from it. Everything is voiced by Jack Black. Over the years I have come to have a love/hate relationship with him in anything. Essentially he seems to be capable of playing two characters… the loveable dumbass, and the egotistical schmuck. I have had more than my fair share of the later, and seeing him involved with a project is cringe worthy these days. So I didn’t know which version of him we would get. I love the music of Tenacious D, but over the years the stage act has shifted from the loveable dumbass character to more and more of the egotistical ass. So my fear going into this game is that we would get that character.

Loveable Dumbass Rules

While the character is not necessarily a loveable dumbass, we get the Jack Black treatment of such… which makes the game enjoyable. You play as Eddie Riggs, which is essentially a Jedi Master Roadie. He is set up as the best roadie in the business, can fix anything or build anything… but is a man out of time. The game starts with him working for a emo numetal type band, that clearly does not appreciate his aesthetic. Through a chain of events, he steps in to prevent the death of one of the band members and ends up falling to his own demise. Where his blood summons the elder fire god Ormagöden through a sigil in the form of his belt buckle.

Chaos ensues, and the fire beast destroys the crappy band to the cheers of the crowd, as your character is transported to another realm. Everything about this game is completely over the top. You find yourself awake on a sacrificial altar with a group of skeletal monk things praying before you. Your character mistakenly thinks that it is you they are worshiping, but instead they mean to sacrifice you to Ormagöden. Sitting there on the ground just happens to be some fabled weapon, and the games tutorial directs you to pick it up and use it. The game controls itself feel a lot like Darkstalkers. I had intended to play the game with an XBox 360 controller, but for whatever reason it got confused. Where it had only some of the keys active through the controller and the majority not.

Thankfully however the game does control very well with WASD and uses the standard E to interact with things. I am always glad to see when some thought is put into the PC controls rather than having a half assed port like Force Unleashed… that you can’t even really use your mouse to interact with things. The game is a bit of a smorgasboard of things. Firstly the game is very much a 3D beatemup with your left mouse button being your axe attacks, and your right mouse button being your guitar chord based attacks. This gameplay style feels really fluid and like I said earlier just like a Darkstalkers game. The only thing that is frustratingly missing is jump. I am not sure why but this is a big deal to me. I am one of those people that jumps around aimlessly while playing games. So instead of the standard space to jump, we get a space too defend mechanic and no jump ability that I have seen so far… or at least none that you are introduced to during the tutorial.

Burn Rubber Baby

In order to make your big escape from the temple of Ormagöden Eddie uses his Jedi Masster Roadie abilities to create a really slick deuce coupe out of spare parts laying around the temple. So this introduces a yet another playstyle into the game. Controlling a vehicle feels like most GTA style games where you W accelerates S brakes and we have a decent mechanic for turning on a dime by hitting space to apply the handbrake. You get to test all of these out in a really odd vehicular battle sequence against a very spikey worm creature thing. Did I mention this game is completely over the top? Everything and everyone is pretty much coated in skulls and spikey bits… as god intended them to be. In the same way Blood Dragon was a love song for 80s action movies… this game is a love letter to the Heavy Metal era.

After the big car battle you have to make your escape over a crumbling bridge by avoiding holes in the road and boosting over gaps by hitting Shift to apply the nitro. Overall this is a pretty simple minigame, and nothing really cringe inducing. Overall the game I pretty damned forgiving when it comes to the minigames I have encountered. While normally I hate when a game breaks out of its normal control scheme and forces you into something different for an “event”, but so far this game feels pretty natural about it. Primarily I have problems with the games that do so, but make it so QTE or twitchy that if you screw up once you are dead. The obstacles you have to avoid on the bridge you can pretty much see for the entirety of the screen giving you plenty of time to react and avoid them. It messages the fact that when you see a big guy fixing to stomp the bridge… you need to avoid that area because it is about to fall.

Real Metal vs Glam Metal

You go to Blade Henge and meet Lars the leader of the fledgeling resistance, his sister Lita… and you find out the girl that helped you escape from the temple is Ophelia. The games central conflict revolves around “Real” metal struggling against the “Glam” metal sellouts. So while the protagonists are dark and brooding and full of spikey bits, the evildoers are wearing pink and zebra print… with teased out hair and a very obvious sellout attitude. You can tell exactly where Double Fine stands on the age old Poison vs Metallica metal debate. Considering I tended to shy away from the glam rock, and favor the more hardcore stuff… I definitely feel them here. It is all the more enjoyable for me to beat up the pretty boy rockers in the game because of it.

As roadie extraordinaire your job is to help them build an army, using your mystical roadie powers. The game employs another mini-game to accomplish this. At various times you can play a power chord that will have some effect. The one you end up doing the most often will summon the Deuce to your location. There is another one that will allow you to pick up new abilities at these shrines of sorts scattered throughout the world. I am guessing that over time this has a Legend of Zelda type trope allowing you to access new areas. As I wandered around the country side I noticed that most of the shrines were chained up, and when I tried to access them there was some flair dialog about needing to find a way to free them.

The first mission to help build an army is to gather up a bunch of brutes that have been trapped in the mine and forced to bang their heads against the wall to break rock. The result is they have turned into this muscle bound troglodytes. As you roam around the level you can play a power chord to rally them to your side. Upon hearing the music they swear allegiance to the heavy metal and will do your bidding. This introduces yet another game play style… I told you it was a smorgasbord. Much of the game seems to rely on small group based squad tactics. You can deliver some simple commands like stay and defend, follow and attack your target. The system lacks any real fine control, so essentially you point your mindless mob towards a target and then go do something else.

The Kill Master

At this point I have only made it about an hour and a half into the game, but I am enjoying it so far. I was pleased to see a cameo from Lemmy Kilmister as the “Kill Master”, a mystical healer type character. I have a feeling that the majority of the gameplay is going to revolve around doing missions to free followers and then using those followers to band together in an army against the evil Doviculus voiced by Tim Curry, and the Glam Metal sellout General Lionwhyte voiced by Rob Halford. While at face value this seems like pretty standard fare, what makes the game worth playing is the fantastic dialog that only a Double Fine game can deliver. While the game sounds pretty Frankenstein in its stitching of a bunch of different genres together. However for some reason it works really well.

I’ve heard that there is a grand switcheroo that comes towards the end of the game, but I have yet to make it there. Where essentially they throw in yet another genre, making you do battle with your army RTS style. If it is as well carried out as the other bits and pieces I think I will be okay with this, but I can see how confused it might feel. I know I was pissed as hell when I got to the “force you to split everyone up into small groups” army battle phase of Dragon Age Origins. But that mostly was because I am notorious for playing that type of game with only my chosen group of four characters, and pretty much ignoring everyone else in my party. In this case I hope I will just be given units and I won’t have had to do much to power them up outside of the normal game play flow.

Overall Enjoyable

While I don’t generally give these games a rating system, I have to say I greatly enjoyed this one. I can see myself cracking it open again and finishing the game. That is about as high of praise as I can really give. I played an hour and a half and I want to play some more. The movies and cut scenes feel like they are part of the game, and not something tacked on for filler. The story crafting is superb and I am definitely a fan of the subject material. Nothing feels cooler than running around kicking stuffs ass while Def Leppard blares in the background. I have loved the games of Tim Schafer since Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle and Full Throttle… and this definitely feels like a worthy member of that family, if not a slightly oddly designed one. It was not exactly what I was expecting, but the sum of the pieces add up to a really fun game.

Next Steampowered Sunday

There are many times when it feels like the readers of this blog are all somehow already connected to me, either through being friends on twitter or somehow having played in one of the many guilds I have been at the helm of. This week however surprised me in that the winner of the Bioshock give away was someone completely unknown to me. I delivered the copy this morning through steam, and having learned a few things from last weeks I have made some tweaks to the lineup for this coming weeks contest. First up I will be using Survey Monkey, to try and cut down on the skewing of the poll by well meaning friends. Next up we will be having a sudden death round among the three titles that came close to winning this time: FTL, Assassins Creed II, and Alan Wake. Finally I happen to have a spare copy of Brutal Legend, so we will be giving that away during the voting. As always you can vote without entering for the copy of the game. To make the link easier to see… I am introducing a “Big Damned Button” below. I made it the most obnoxious 80s induced color palette I could think of just to make it stand out even more.